


The Other Becket

by Spurlunk



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Family, Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 00:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spurlunk/pseuds/Spurlunk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it feel like to be the one that got left behind?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Becket

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Alice and @bagends for betaing, your help was invaluable and I truly appreciate it.

Jazmine's mother devoured romance novels. She trawled thrift stores, snapping up every cheap paperback she could find. She was going through a regency phase when her sons were born, one just a year after the other. By the time Jazmine came around, four years later, she had moved on to more contemporary fare.

Their neighborhood in Anchorage was safe. They had a big house with an expansive yard. The boys played outside, yelling and shouting and coming home all grass-stained and scraped up. Jazmine wasn't allowed to go with them because her mother said they were too rough. She was too busy reading to pay much attention and by the time Jazmine was six or seven, she was outside trying her hardest to be included in their games. Sometimes she would threaten to start crying if they didn't let her play with them. Since they didn't want their mother to come yell at them, they would decide she could be the princess that they had to rescue. Jazmine didn't want to be the princess. She wanted to be one of the knights, like they were, but she didn't complain, happy to have even a small role in their game. More often than not, they got so into their play fighting, hacking at each other with tree branch swords, they would just forget about her completely. Jazmine got used to it. They weren't being mean to her and they didn't intend to make her feel bad; they were just so engrossed in each other that everybody else ceased to matter. Sometimes she didn't mind just sitting there and watching them, because even when they were just playing, they moved together with a rhythm so innate it was almost like they were reading each other's minds.

Jazmine was thirteen when her mother died. The funeral was quiet. It was two years after the first kaiju attacks. With the increasing amount of casualties, there was less fanfare devoted to individuals. Raleigh and Yancy went up to the headstone together, murmuring in low voices - to each other or to their mother, Jazmine didn't know. When they moved away, she walked up and traced the name of her mother engraved in the stone, a few tears dripping to the ground. She went to join her brothers. Yancy grabbed her in a hug, holding her close. She buried her face in his chest, crying. Their father tossed Raleigh the car keys and told him to go home. He said that he would join them later, that he needed time alone. Raleigh was seventeen and had only gotten his license a few months ago, so he eagerly took his chance to drive. 

Their father never came back. Raleigh and Yancy talked it over and decided to go try to be Jaeger Pilots. Jazmine didn't bother asking to go with them. They would get accepted. Once Yancy decided to do something, it would happen, and whatever Yancy did, Raleigh would have to do it too. They sent Jazmine to live with an elderly aunt in the Midwest, far away from the coast. It was cold and lonely. They wrote her letters, when they remembered, with both of their signatures at the bottom. 

Jazmin got a job at the local gas station, where she sat behind the counter flipping through magazines, poring over every page and soaking in every detail. She learned everything there was to know about all of the Jaeger pilots. Sometimes she stole the magazines that had pictures or interviews with her brothers in them. The danger seemed remote here, out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody for miles around had ever seen a kaiju or a Jaeger in person. 

She read about Jaeger technology and neuroscience. They said that neural handshakes were much stronger with family members than any other case. Because Yancy and Raleigh were already closer than most brothers, of course they were Drift compatible. Jazmine could never imagine herself being so trusting of another person, to let them see everything about her, yet at the same time she was incredibly jealous and wished she could share that experience with someone. Her brothers were out there fighting kaiju and she was stuck here, the person everyone left and nobody wanted.

She didn't really do well in school and spent most of her time reading romance novels. She was trying to figure out why her mother liked them so much. She didn't stick around to graduate. Raleigh and Yancy had never finished high school and they were out saving the world. Why should she bother? Jazmin took all the money she had saved up and used it to move to New York. She had originally thought she could lose herself in all the people, but all it managed to do was make her feel more isolated. If she just disappeared no one would ever miss her. 

She never watched any of the battles her brothers fought in. She couldn't. It would fill her with an ache that stayed for days. She had never wished for anything as hard as she wished she was with them in those giant robots. She wanted it even more than she wanted her parents back. 

She had stopped getting letters from Raleigh and Yancy when she moved. Partly because she hadn't told anyone where she was going. She stopped writing back a few years before that. But it was impossible to not know what had happened, when the media doted over the Becket brothers so much. 

Jazmine didn't think she had any feelings left for them anymore. She had hardened herself, keep herself from feeling too much. Her indulgence, reading the Jaeger magazines, clearly proved otherwise. When she heard about Yancy's death - about how Raleigh had been connected to him when he was killed - she dropped everything to go find her one remaining brother. She took buses straight across the country to the hospital where he had been taken, only to be told that he was no longer there and nobody knew where he had gone. He had quit the program. 

She decided to stay. She didn't really think Raleigh was going to come back here, but she stayed anyway. She started out as a hospital aide and worked her way up to the front receptionist desk, answering phones and looking things up on the computer. Jazmine had never been very good at making friends. Most people told her that they found her cold and maybe even a little hostile, but people started to know her name and said hello to her when they passed her in the hallway. She started watching the news again. She still recognized some of the names of the Jaeger pilots, but felt no personal connection to them. That was before Raleigh turned up again. She was watching the news, unprepared for the familiar headshot jolting right through her like she'd been struck by lightning. It was right next to a picture of a young Japanese girl with blue highlights in her hair. They were drift compatible. 

Where Jazmine lived, there was no real danger during the last Kaiju battle. A lot of people, craving companionship, went to each other's houses to watch the news on big screens. Jazmine stayed home and went through a photo album, one of the few things she had taken from her aunt's house when she left. There was a picture of Raleigh and Yancy as boys, arms flung around each other's necks, and herself as a little girl, staring up at them adoringly. It was the first time she had looked at those pictures since Yancy died. She remembered the feeling of his arms around her at their mother's funeral, and curled up onto her side on the couch. When she woke up, the war was over.

Jazmine moved on. She got her GED and went to night school to become a nurse. She continued working at the hospital, made a few friends, even started seeing someone.

She was at a grocery store, of all places, trying to decide whether she should buy regular milk even though her girlfriend only drank two percent. She heard a familiar voice behind her and whirled around so fast she almost gave herself whiplash.

It was Raleigh, standing there smiling at her. His hair was ruffled and messy and he was wearing a blue sweater and baggy pants that would have looked more at home on a farm than anywhere else. He was bigger and broader, his eyes older but still crinkling up at the edges as he grinned. She hesitated only for a minute before he grabbed her in a hug, holding her so tight she thought she might burst. 

"Hey," he said into her hair, and she laughed, tearing up a little. "I'm sorry we left you. I'm sorry you were alone," he whispered, so softly he might not have spoken at all. She pulled back, looking up at him steadily. "How did you find me?"

"Mako helped."

"I heard about her. She sounds pretty amazing." Jazmine said, her groceries forgotten. Mako was a media darling, what with her unusual past. Time magazine had declared her their 'Person of the Year', calling her a 'symbol of humanity's resilience and courage'.

"Yeah," Raleigh sighed, a look coming into his eyes that Jazmine had only ever read about in her mother's old romance novels. She smiled. "You like her." 

Raleigh just looked at her like that was the biggest understatement he'd ever heard. They had shifted into a new version of being siblings, but it felt as familiar to her as if they had never spent a day apart.

"I want you to meet her. We're going to get married. Well, I haven't asked her yet, but I think she knows," he said. Jazmine was aware of a few people around her stopping to look. They had made a little bit of a scene, and it was only a matter of time before someone recognized Raleigh's face. She took her brother by the arm and steered him towards the exit.

"Do you have a ring? How are you going to ask her? You should track down her family in Japan. I bet she has some aunts and uncles left. You're going to have to invite them to the wedding. Where are you going to get married?" she asked.

"Uh..." Raleigh managed to get out, looking completely lost. Jazmine smiled. This felt completely new to her, but comfortingly familiar at the same time. She felt happier than she had in a long, long time. She knew that her bitterness over being left behind hadn't gone away, but she didn't want to deal with that right now. Nothing could ruin her mood today.

"That's okay, I'll help. First, we need to get her a ring. What kind of jewelry does she like? I can't wait to meet her!"

Raleigh looked down at her and smiled. She had missed him so much.

"You two are definitely going to get along."


End file.
